When did it all start?

Before the internet

Before the internet, our social circles just were not that big. We did not have 400 Facebook friends, 500 LinkedIn connections and so on. Those who did have such networks were rich and could afford personal assistants to help them with the tasks we are today trying to delegate to relationship management software.

With the internet

As software started to eat the world, corporate relationship management tools started to appear. The most popular today are apps like Salesforce or Hubspot. Those tools solved a genuine problem for big corporations who relied on Excel spreadsheets up to then. Problems included:

• It was difficult to know who told what & when to which customer
• It was difficult to define who was responsible for which customer
• Using spreadsheets just wasn't appropriate and make the work difficult.

That's why up to today, Salesforce is simply a better looking spreadsheet. CRMs aren't magic by default. They simply allow you to log interactions, move clients along funnels, set reminders and deal sizes. Nothing magical.

As the internet matured

In recent years, we've seen new types of smart CRMs appear. Intelligent features include the ability to sync data with emails, automations (for ex. if you set a deal size, the customer is moved to the next stage of the funnel), data enrichment and so on.

What about Personal Relationship Managers?

The oldest personal relationship manager was probably a spreadsheet. With time, the Internet disrupted every industry and more and more people would meet and know more and more people. This made the I-feel-like-I'm-losing-touch problem critical for not just the super-rich, but more and more managers, investors, consultants and generally professionals.

What exactly is a Personal Relationship Manager?

The logic is simple. As CRMs have proven themselves to be extremely effective in managing clients, there is no reason not to implement this successful experience in your own professional and personal life.

A personal relationship manager is a business tool that allows users to organise their contacts in order to improve their network and grow and nurture both business and personal relations.

Why do you need a Personal Relationship Manager?

When it comes to success and personal growth, you have to think long term. Forging relationships is foundational to such a far-sighted strategy. Entrepreneurs spend countless hours thinking about how they can improve their business, there is no reason professionals shouldn't do the same about improving their relationships and network.

As says David A. Fields:

Relationships are everything. I define wealth as relationship strength.

Ask yourself this question: Do you have many contacts and connections that could potentially generate a lot of opportunities for you? Just look at LinkedIn, if you were in touch with all of your connections, how would things be different? How many more partnerships, job offers or ideas would you get?

If you want to increase efficiency, become more organised, and increase your income than you definitely need to consider personal relationship manager. Nowadays such a system may be useful for any person from real estate agent to top manager of a large enterprise.

How do personal relationship management apps work?

The basic personal relationship manager works like this:

1. You import your contact list (either manually via a CSV file or through a Google Contacts integration for example)
2. You log interactions with your contacts as they happen
3. You set reminders to reach out to contacts
4. Once you get the reminders, you reach out.

At Nat, we find this approach very time-consuming and inefficient, but it works well for some people. While more modern CRMs include more automation, the approach stays relatively the same.

Benefits of using a tool to manage your network

We get asked this question all the time: What are the real measurable benefits of using a tool like Dex, Uphabit or Covve?

You get a clear overview over your network

Only the greatest CEOs and sales people are able to answer those questions:

• What is the real size of your network?
• How many people are in your close circles?
• Who are you losing touch with right now?

Originally, the way to answer those questions was to have personal assistants who would analyse contact books and email interactions to figure out those things. Excellent networkers would also spend countless hours writing notes about people that they would store physically!

How to write notes today

Writing on small paper cards that you would store somewhere is a bit outdated. Instead, you'll want to store information about the people you know digitally. That's a big part of the value a Personal Relationship Manager will provide to you.

Thus, make sure to choose a personal relationship manager based on the quality of their note-taking system. Nat allows users to write notes simply by replying to emails sent by their CRM app. This means you can take notes simply from your email client. Levitate has done this nicely as well by asking users to write notes about recent events every time they log into the app.

Input is good, output is great!

Only writing notes is good, but how will you leverage this new information about your contacts? You don't want your precious data to just be stored somewhere in the cloud. Instead, you want this data to be resurfaced when you need it!

When choosing a relationship manager, look for good search features that allow you to search for a contact based on notes. Also look for tools that resurface those notes before your next meeting with that person!